After Duke Prosecution Began to Collapse, Demonizing Continued

Published: April 15, 2007

The rape case that cost three Duke University lacrosse players a year of their lives and much more of their youth finally ended on Wednesday, when North Carolina Attorney General Roy A. Cooper said what many people have long known: all three were totally innocent of the charges against them.

But since last week was one for pondering language and apology, here’s what those who know Reade Seligmann of Essex Fells, N.J., Collin Finnerty of Garden City, on Long Island, and David Evans of Bethesda, Md., are wondering. How did college kids with no shortage of character witnesses become such a free-fire zone for the correct thinkers in academia, the news media and the socially conscious left? Like l’affaire Imus in reverse, why did denouncing them remain fair game long after it was clear that the charges against them could not be true, and that even most of the misbehavior originally alleged about the team party was distorted or false?

“That’s what I keep asking,” said Ed Abbot, the mayor of this village where the Seligmanns live, and a longtime friend of the family. “People had racial agendas, economic agendas, media-driven agendas, and who these boys were got totally lost. You feel like you’re in the middle of the forest screaming and no one can hear.”

I went to Duke and have a son there, so maybe I was predisposed to hear the scream. But by now only those who get a delicious, angry jolt just from hearing the words “white male privilege” are not feeling a bit ill.

The initial reaction was not inexplicable. After all, the prosecutor, Michael B. Nifong, had repeatedly said that the students were guilty of the gang rape of a black woman.

But Tricia Dowd, a teacher from East Northport, N.Y., whose son Kyle was a senior on the team, watched in stunned horror as the case and its attendant demonizing of bad white boys kept going, even after DNA evidence that Mr. Nifong promised would convict the guilty and free the innocent matched no one on the team.

(Only later was it revealed that he had also failed to release information showing evidence of DNA from other men.)

Mrs. Dowd went to an angry meeting at North Carolina Central University, the predominantly black institution the accuser attended, where Mr. Nifong, who was running for office, promised to keep the case alive, and where one student said he wanted to see the Duke students prosecuted “whether it happened or not,” to atone for past sins.

“Maybe I’m naïve,” Mrs. Dowd said. “I didn’t know there was so much hate in the world.”

Nona Farahnik, who lived in the same dormitory as Mr. Finnerty and Mr. Seligmann, said, “When they said it was Reade and Collin, everyone knew it didn’t happen.”

But a year later, it was still alive.

“I guess the ruptures in our society are so deep this was an easy thing for people to cling to,” she said. “They became a perfect example of all the injustices in society, except in their case, justice went out the door. And the same people usually championing basic human rights were so intent on denying it to them.”

Which brings us to the confluence out of Tom Wolfe of Rutgers women’s basketball and Duke men’s lacrosse.

You could argue — correctly — that an ugly racist remark, joke or not, about black women has far more potential to harm than one about white men.

You could argue — correctly — that the injustice from one hideous remark by Don Imus that was defended by no one, including the man who uttered it, paled before that meted out to the lacrosse players over a year.

You could observe — correctly — that under the spotlight both teams behaved with much more class and maturity than did many of their elders.

But while Mr. Imus groveled (unsuccessfully) for his professional life, don’t count on many forced apologies from those in academia (particularly at Duke), the news media, and civil rights and women’s rights organizations who were so intoxicated by the story of bad white boys that they missed the real outrage: how prosecutors can railroad innocent people, nearly all of them without the students’ resources or abilities to fight back.

And it’s worth noting that many of the heroes of the Duke tale were black: James Coleman, a law professor who was the one Duke faculty member willing to take on Mr. Nifong; Moezeldin Elmostafa, a cabdriver who provided a crucial part of Mr. Seligmann’s alibi; Ed Bradley of “60 Minutes,” who worked tirelessly to get the story right, despite suffering from fatal leukemia.

Mrs. Dowd, after the rape charges were dropped in December, sent an e-mail message to Houston Baker, a celebrated English professor at Duke who, when the story first broke, condemned rapacious athletes “safe under the cover of silent whiteness” given “license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech and feel proud of themselves in the bargain.” She asked him if he would reconsider his early statements.

“LIES!” responded Dr. Baker, now a distinguished university professor of English at Vanderbilt. He said she was a “provacateur” who was “trying to get credit for a scummy bunch of white males!” He accused the players of living like “farm animals” and concluded that she should forgive him if she really is “quite sadly, mother of a ‘farm animal.’ ”

We like simple tales in this country, and, for some, the ritual stoning of Mr. Imus played out that way. But the world is a lot more complicated than that. Just ask Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty or David Evans.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

A version of this article appeared in print on April 15, 2007, on page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: After Duke Prosecution Began to Collapse, Demonizing Continued.